For all of Germany’s “soft power” — it is a humanely governed economic powerhouse whose approval rating in global opinion surveys easily tops that of the United States — the country remains a military and intelligence weakling. That rankles. Never mind that Germans themselves swore off hard power — because of history. And so German politicians and media play the victimization card. “The promise ‘Never do evil again’ has evolved into a more comfortable promise: ‘Never endure evil again,’ ” Lehming wrote. If this implies moral equivalence between spying by a democratic United States and a Nazi Gestapo or Communist Stasi — well, so be it. Some of the NSA’s harshest German critics are members of the Left Party, successor to the Communist Party of East Germany. In short, Snowden’s disclosures have tapped Germans’ deep but usually unacknowledged feelings about their rightful place in the world, which won’t easily be bottled up again. One oft-suggested remedy — admitting Germany, at last, to the U.S.-led inner circle of nations that don’t eavesdrop on each other — might soothe feelings in German officialdom. In 2009, German intelligence was “a little grumpy” at getting less access to NSA data than France, according to one of Snowden’s documents. But in terms of repairing the U.S. image in Germany, this gesture might be too little, too late. From a U.S. perspective, the costs could outweigh the benefits, for the same reason that it’s always risky to let more people in on a secret. Chancellor Angela Merkel must be seething. As if she didn’t have enough trouble negotiating a new coalition government and dealing with the euro. It’s not clear what the U.S. can do to right the situation except apologize, swear not to do it again, sign some sort of a no-spy agreement and continue to be the best ally it can be. The first two of the four it has already done. Being a top-flight and trusted ally is something it will have to continue to work on. THE SPOOKS CLUB As mentioned in the article above, “One oft-suggested remedy — admitting Germany, at last, to the U.S.-led inner circle of nations that don’t eavesdrop on each other — might soothe feelings in German officialdom. Germany is not letting any grass grow under its feet in an attempt to be part of the American “Spook” inner-circle. DW reported, “In August, two months after President Barack Obama's first official visit and weeks before the country's federal election, when revelations and public anger over alleged mass spying activities on Germany by the NSA refused to die down, Berlin hatched a plan to mitigate the fallout.
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